Be cool

My good friend returned to campus a different man. The boy who once channeled a grizzly indie armchair philosopher from a gritty DKNY ad had decided to come out of the closet as an insipid man. What had hitherto been tasteful had now been replaced by an exciting array of vomit-inducing characteristics. His new female companion, too, had stood in for Munch's painting "The Scream" while it was stolen; now that it had been recovered, she was clearly out of a job. The stress of maintaining a unique personality had precipitated this drastic change, though I believed a simple change of hairstyle would have sufficed. He was trying really hard to be cool. This mental volte-face was repugnant, and I avoided him for a week. Finally he called me.

"Hey bro," drawled my new and unimproved friend, "I haven't seen you around in a while, so I thought I would phone you."

"How fitting," I replied, "seeing as how you are very phony."

"Man," he said. "I knew that was what you were pissed about, dude. That I've been, like, cool and stuff. I spent all of last year being some weirdo. This year it's all about being sociable, dude. College is all a game, dude. I'm a man of Princeton."

"If this game," I snarled, "involves self-immolation upon the altar of stupidity, then no thanks. Being constituted as the object of others opinions is not my idea of a life well-lived. When it comes to friends, I prefer quality to quantity. Less is sometimes more, though that is unfortunately not the case with brain cells."

"What?" he whined.

Peer pressure, disguised as Princeton tradition or culture, is powerful. Most people don't last longer than a week. Like nasty streptococcus bacteria trading plasmids, many freshmen begin acquiring antibiotic resistance to good taste and originality almost immediately, turning into deadly carbon copies of each other. The results, like a Shigella diarrhea epidemic, are devastatingly destructive. It isn't just a matter of discomfort. The urge to be cool, to fit in, is the impetus behind the marginalization of minorities and cultural stagnation. Degenerates who don't play lacrosse or pop their collars, who don't get, let's just say, feces-faced every night on their beloved Street, are immediately relegated to the social gas chambers of Spelman and Pyne.

There is no excuse for such unfashionably bad taste these days. The poster person for coolness on this campus is still the straight white bourgeois boy who wears vintage chic to Lawnparties and jerks to hip-hop that gives him just the right amount of street-cred and political correctness. Yawn. It's a strange way of pretending that Princeton is really just a new-age finishing school for — let's say it — rich middle-class children. It says a lot that freshmen have to listen to a talk on campus diversity despite the fact that Princeton is ostensibly one of the best schools for some minorities; I don't see anyone reminding freshmen why Princeton is one of the best schools for, oh let's see, academics. That sort of thing reminds me of people who wear T-shirts that say "stud" or "model" — you're not fooling anybody. Sadly, it's often been a fight between the progressive-enough attitudes of the administration in promoting diversity and change and the regressive attitudes of many students on this campus. And no, Rihanna doesn't count. Bastion of the status quo, the student body often leaves me feeling like a James Bond martini: shaken, not stirred.

Some people will always talk about a Princeton tradition, as though history had inscribed commandments upon their foreheads. It's easy to hide behind myths that refer to a time before you were born, but it's literally brainless. Others say not to judge a book by its cover, that beneath the preppy school uniforms are "diverse individuals." OK, but when I see Cliffs Notes, I like to call them Cliffs Notes. Besides, everyone is a bundle of visual signifiers: dichotomizing the difference between what people look like and their personalities is an old-fashioned Cartesian mind-body duality. There has been some progress in the right direction, inch by inch. I thought I saw a couple of hippie tree-hugging freshmen, and even some with piercings, but who knows how long before they disappear into the Darwinian maw of cultural coolness. Johann Loh is a sophomore from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.